The ability to collect massive amounts of information has become a necessity in business today. It thus becomes important that organizations and individuals are provided with a work environment in which information is delivered to them in a meaningful way. Existing tools typically provide visibility into this information using a report engine or a database application enabling navigation to the information of interest.
A report engine usually creates reports that are more meaningful to software developers than to end users. In addition, analysis of a report may be time-consuming because a report does not visually illustrate the relationships between its data elements.
A database application typically retrieves data from a database in response to a query. Queries are often written by software developers or database administrators who are familiar with a database query language (e.g., the structured query language (SQL)) and the data model of the database. When an end user needs to see a combination of data that cannot be retrieved by an existing query, the end user has to request a database administrator to create a new query for the desired combination of data. This results in inconvenience and inefficiency.
Some database applications allow end users to define data queries using tools that do not require extensive knowledge of database operation and structure. However, the end users typically need extensive training to be able to use those tools productively and without professional help.